Paul Viapiano2014-09-14T22:36:42Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2014://1Movable TypeCopyright (c) 2014, PViapianoAn Experiment2014-09-14T22:36:42Z2014-09-14T22:16:57Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2014://1.1812014-09-14T22:16:57ZWritten in January 2013 when Elise was nine years old Tonight was an experiment. I asked Elise to accompany me to a Piano Spheres concert featuring pianist Vicki Ray at The Colburn School. It was a school night and the...PViapianoMusicWritten in January 2013 when Elise was nine years old

Tonight was an experiment. I asked Elise to accompany me to a Piano Spheres concert featuring pianist Vicki Ray at The Colburn School. It was a school night and the concert started at 8pm, her usual bedtime. On top of that, the Piano Spheres concerts are themselves experimental in nature, offering a collaboration of composers and musicians in contemporary music. She was a good sport about getting dressed up and going downtown, excited to see the town all lit up and the places where I work.

When we got to the school, the person at the box office recognized me from the LA Philharmonic concert of the week before. Elise was very impressed that someone would know who I was. She even asked me if I was famous...uh, no dear, except maybe in my mind. When we walked into the hall she wanted to sit in the third row center. I was a little apprehensive, but went along with it. Elise hasn't had much formal concert experience and I'm a stickler for concert etiquette, but I thought since this was an experiment, why not?

The first piece was written by Chinary Ung, for piano, cello and violin. All the players wore a wireless headset microphone to intone fragments of speech in a language definitely not English. Thick layers of instrumental sound including piano work inside the instrument prevailed along with whistling from the players as well. Elise was a little uncomfortable after her initial curiosity gave way. "That sounds like a fictional language, Dad" and then, "I'm not sure I like this", but she sat through it quietly and applauded at the finish.

The second piece was for solo piano, quite beautiful in its unusual harmony, a contemporary haiku. Vicki played it beautifully and it was very evocative of the title, Flowing Water Caress Fallen Petals. Elise didn't respond to the tone poem aspect and started to fidget slightly. I think it was settling in that the whole concert would be similar and she wasn't necessarily thrilled that she wasn't connecting with it.

The third piece was titled, Rad, played by two players on electronic keyboards. The instruments seemed to be tuned microtonally, sometimes producing a quasi-gamelan effect. It was an extremely difficult piece to play and to listen to. The players wore a small earpiece and my guess is that they were listening to a click track to keep them together. Occasionally they would play with elbows and forearms, but much of it was filled with fast flying notes, at times sounding like rapid-fire conversation between two cartoon characters. I pointed this out quietly to Elise, who by this time would have none of it and was quietly whining about going home and not being able to listen to much more.

I can't say that I blamed her, for it was very difficult, even for a musician accustomed to playing new music. We left at intermission, and had a discussion in the car about how important it is for artists to break new barriers, to always push and experiment. I told her how proud I was of her for coming with me and listening, for her excellent behavior and how important it is to experience everything we can whether we end up liking it or not.

It was a night of experiments.

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Organized2011-04-04T21:57:51Z2011-04-04T21:53:55Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2011://1.1802011-04-04T21:53:55ZWhen I was growing up, my father worked for the Prudential Insurance Company as a salesman. It was a time when your insurance agent would visit to collect the monthly premium for policies and have a chat over coffee. He’d...PViapianoReminiscence
When I was growing up, my father worked for the Prudential Insurance Company as a salesman. It was a time when your insurance agent would visit to collect the monthly premium for policies and have a chat over coffee. He’d hear the neighborhood gossip, who was getting married, who just had a new son or daughter, and thus get new leads for business. He was good at it, being an amiable people-person and he was honest, unlike others in the trade at the time. People trusted him to sell them a life insurance policy commensurate with their family’s needs and ability to afford the premium. I remember him making weekly or monthly visits to customers to collect a premium of a quarter or even a nickel. Each customer was given the same courtesy and friendly shoulder to lean on.

He was also a labor organizer, a representative of the agents in the union local. I grew up hearing about actions, grievances, steward reports and changes the company was making in the workaday world of its salesmen that would affect their lives and livelihood. He was aggressive in his principles for his fellow workers, but always fair. He realized that there had to be a give-and-take between company and worker. As soon as I was old enough to use a typewriter, he enlisted me to type his union reports. Though barely old enough to understand what was really going on in these documents, I absorbed the gist of this age-old push-pull relationship.

The neighborhood where I lived in Buffalo, New York was mostly blue collar; first generation sons of German, Italian and Polish immigrants, part of the great Ellis Island wave from the turn of the last century. Buffalo was an industrial town with an unmatched location on Lake Erie. The once-great steel companies had factories and forgeries there, along with the American auto manufacturers. Work was plentiful and the unions made sure that workers were being treated fairly.

This is what unions have always been about, treating workers fairly. Unions gave workers a voice, it wasn’t a take-it-or-leave-it proposition as coal miners had seen in the mid-South; company towns that economically entrapped and suffocated the very people it relied on, along with some of the most dangerous working conditions that any American has ever had to endure.

At various times throughout our country’s modern history, unions have had a bad rap. Companies have cried that workers’ demands were choking the economic life out of them, demands were exorbitant, that the very idea of a union was anti-American. To paraphrase Sean Mitchell of the LA Times writing in 2007 about the threat of a Hollywood writer’s strike as viewed through the prism of the writers’ experiences in the 1930s, “…as if unions and the whole idea of collective bargaining were anathema to the American way of life…that having all those workers working under one banner would mean the creation of ‘a workers soviet’”. The very idea is absolutely ridiculous.

I remember hearing complaints about special concessions and “perks” given to auto and steel workers, the number of paid minor holidays, paid birthdays and the like. No one ever stopped to ask the reason why workers were able to get these “extras” and saw the union members as spoiled brats. Well, sometimes companies weren’t willing to give decent pay raises, so workers took what they could by other means during negotiations.

Today, many of the things that looked like perks are gone due to the changing nature of America’s work, outsourcing and the march of time on economies in general, but the persistent view that unions are greedy and disingenuous in their dealings with companies and non-union workers remains. Many of these views were formed early in the twentieth century, when the work world was a rough and tumble place, trying to find its way in transition from an agrarian to a newly industrialized society. Long gone are practices like “featherbedding” and other perceived abuses.

Unions, more than ever, want and need to work together with companies and governments (no matter what you’ve been reading or listening to lately), because in the end, despite their differences, desperately need each other. Workers need jobs and benefits, and companies need workers, happy workers, to run them. The aggressive and hyperbolic nature of anti-union vitriol, both from government and industry, does no one any good and much harm to the lower and middle classes that form the vast majority of both our labor pool and the economic backbone of our country.

The recent standoff in Wisconsin between the state’s government and its workers, shows what can happen if this wrong-headed view of present-day unions is taken too far. Workers need unions as a buffer between them and their employers. Rare is the company who always looks out for the best interests of their employees, without the need for mediation, especially when that company happens to be publicly traded and is constantly striving to please their shareholders with the bottom line.

Unions make for happier and healthier workers, happy workers buy more of America’s products, healthy workers have less sick days and are better equipped to make the company they work for more successful. It’s a cycle that makes a lot of sense and one that shouldn’t be overlooked, even in these dire times of cost-cutting.

I think my friends in the old neighborhood would agree.

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The Stack2010-08-21T06:04:31Z2010-08-21T06:00:08Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2010://1.1792010-08-21T06:00:08ZI’ve been reading and thinking about a lot of things lately, trying to put ideas together for new essays and finish ones already started both on paper (okay, on the screen) and in my mind. There’s just so much on...PViapianoBooks
I’ve been reading and thinking about a lot of things lately, trying to put ideas together for new essays and finish ones already started both on paper (okay, on the screen) and in my mind. There’s just so much on my mindplate and they’re all making relentless attempts to be heard. The quote from Ray Bradbury that I titled Preface was designed as an introduction to a larger piece that I’m working on. This week a few more ideas were unsurfaced as I read David Lipsky’s account of traveling with David Foster Wallace on a book tour, which in turn led me back to Jonathan Franzen’s much talked about essay for Harper’s about the decline of reading and the novel itself. The recent news that Amazon sold more eBooks than hardcovers also begged to be added to the mix, analyzed, talked about and judged.

So while the last tracks for that particular tune are being recorded and awaiting final mixdown (what a metaphor!), I wanted to share my summer reading list (what a segue!). I don’t know how you feel about it but I love to see what others are reading. Sneaking peeks at coffee shops or anywhere around town, it’s good to see people with a book. At least here in Pasadena the difference is noticeable compared to the omnipresent three-ring tome with brass binding posts hymnal from the Church of Our Lady of the Perpetual Screenplay that is so widely venerated in my previous hangtown of Studio City/Sherman Oaks/The Valley.

My list is always an eclectic fuel mixture that is heavy on nonfiction, but something tells me that fiction is in my future. Make that a lot of fiction. But for the time being let’s get started and see what’s on my bedside table, affectionately heretofore referred to as The Stack*.

I mentioned David Lipsky’s book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, a tour-de-force of a 1996 interview lasting one week as Lipsky traveled with Wallace on the Infinite Jest tour, the 1,000+ page novel that heralded Wallace as the new voice in American fiction. Wallace is at once brilliant, insecure, brilliant, hilarious, paranoid, competitive, brilliant and disturbed like the thousand delicate nerve endings he keeps referring to. I’ve never read Infinite Jest but I plan to someday soon. A book like that takes a serious commitment from a reader and that’s one of the many discussions that take place throughout the course of the book, including how fame and expectations affect a writer’s ability to produce good work. Originally planned to be contemporaneously published in Rolling Stone, the piece never ran and is now presented in its nearly unedited entirety, including David’s asides to his dogs. There are a lot of gems here and some terrific insight from Wallace as well as a look inside the head of a brilliant guy who tragically ended his life in 2008.

Edgar Degas by Bernd Growe is one of those beautifully produced little books published by Taschen that sell for $10. The printing and reproductions are wonderfully rich, if small, and are among the finest small guides to artists available. The ballet oils and pastels are here as well as several view-from-the-orchestra-pit paintings. Is there anything more exquisite than Degas? Recently, I spent an afternoon at the Norton Simon Museum here in Pasadena among their healthy collection of Degas works…transportation and transformation all within a few short hours.

Jonathan Franzen’s novel, The Corrections, a National Book Award winner from 2001 sits patiently at page 126 awaiting my reengagement. I’m very rarely drawn so heavily into fiction, but this one has its talons in me and won’t let go. Only life itself has pulled me away for a few weeks. Franzen’s essays for The New Yorker and other magazines are unmatched in subject and style, as witnessed by his latest New Yorker piece on the slaughter of songbirds in Europe. His collection, How To Be Alone, is in reread rotation here as well.

The catalog for the Frederick H. Evans show at The Getty is anxious to be cracked open. Evans was a pioneer in platinum printing with large format cameras and the show was comprehensive in its scope. If you read my previous piece, need I say more?

George Seurat – The Drawings is another art book that takes my breath away. How does one scribble with crayon on paper with almost no line and conjure up a whole world of light and shadow, fooling our mind into seeing detail where there is none, doing it so intimately and effortlessly as to appear casual yet bring us to tears as it reverberates in our souls?

Reporting At Wit’s End – Tales from The New Yorker by St. Clair McKelway is an anthology of his work for the magazine from the 1930s to the 1960s. He wrote about crime and criminals, scammers, counterfeiters and the fringes of “normal” society, a New York of another time. I’ve only read the introduction by Adam Gopnik so far, but it already has me hungry for the eighteen pieces inside.

There’s a bunch of other stuff on The Stack as well, books on printmaking and related techniques like chine colle, one on antique packaging, a new book from Gerald Klickstein on practicing, performance and wellness, another of interviews with singers and conductors working in opera today (Pierre Boulez hates orchestra subs! Who knew?). A week or two ago there was Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists and a book on Baroque painting in Bologna.

My wife has always said that I’m the gatekeeper of useless information, but that’s what happens when you’re bitten by the reading bug, a lifetime of reading and referrals that begat this which begat that and spiral onward. If only I could wean myself from FaceBook and do some real work. But that’s a subject for another day.

* I stole this name from another blogger but can’t find the reference anymore, so I have appropriated its use for descriptive purposes all in the spirit of full disclosure.

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Life is a Platinum Print2010-07-04T09:04:56Z2010-07-04T09:03:36Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2010://1.1782010-07-04T09:03:36ZThis past week as I prepared to print several new photographs in platinum/palladium, those noblest of elemental metals, I didn’t expect anything out of the ordinary. A year and a half ago, I put a lot of time into not...PViapianoMisc
This past week as I prepared to print several new photographs in platinum/palladium, those noblest of elemental metals, I didn’t expect anything out of the ordinary. A year and a half ago, I put a lot of time into not only learning the ins and outs of the process but also the crafting of large size negatives, both digitally and the traditional method requiring long hours in the darkroom.

You see, platinum printing is a contact process. You need a negative the same size as your final image and it needs to have certain properties in order to create a rich print, but that’s only the beginning. The prints are made on beautifully tactile watercolor or printmaking paper. Because such paper is manufactured acid-free for archival longevity, it contains carbonates that raise the pH of the paper into the alkaline end of the scale. This alkaline pH doesn’t get along with the platinum/palladium emulsion, which is by nature slightly acidic, and all sorts of maladies ensue ranging from washed-out images to mottled, blotchy prints. Soaking the paper in a relatively benign dilute acid bath for several minutes and drying it overnight usually ensures success.

By now you’re probably saying, “Doesn’t he know that there are digital cameras and inkjet printers that would save him a lot of time?” Well…yes, but there’s nothing like the fun (my definition) of slopping, I mean, brushing emulsion on paper. You’re making light-sensitive paper by hand and it’s as analog a process as can be especially in today’s speed-of-light existence, no pun intended.

After the paper dries, you slap the negative in place and expose in the sun or a UV exposure unit for a few minutes, take the paper out and pour hot developer over it all at once. The image comes up immediately in beautiful rich tones. After a few clearing baths to rid the paper of excess salts, the print is washed and laid out to dry. It’s as close to magic as anything can be.

Once you’ve done this a few hundred times you start getting the hang of it (Malcolm Gladwell says that 10,000 hours is needed to become an expert in a field) and you can count on getting reliable results despite the huge number of variables inherent in a hand process like this.

Until…something goes wrong.

Well, it happened. Just as I was looking forward to making many new prints (while my girls were out-of-state visiting family for the week), I started getting results that didn’t match the quality of the prints I had been making for the past year. I checked my chemistry, the exposure unit, the brush…even the humidity, but it takes a lot of time to isolate the problem by changing just one variable at a time. Each iteration seems endless…mix chemicals, coat paper, wait for it to dry, humidify paper, expose, develop, clear, wash, dry.

I finally tracked the problem down to the paper, an all too common occurrence among platinum printers. Manufacturers change formulas without notice and although the changes don’t matter much to watercolor artists and printmakers, people like me who are dependent upon a precarious set of conditions are thrown into the abyss.

It got me thinking about how much life is like a platinum print. We settle into a groove, going about our daily routine, learning and loving, making it better, keeping our heads down and going for it. Then something comes along to uproot the balance we’ve struck and our lives need to be reevaluated, reordered, reconsidered. Sorting through can take a while but hopefully we’ll come out the other side stronger, confident and ready for more. Here’s to that hope for all of us…

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Preface2010-05-11T17:48:49Z2010-05-11T17:45:58Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2010://1.1772010-05-11T17:45:58ZI am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs...PViapianoInspiration

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

- Ray Bradbury, The Paris Review, Spring 2010

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Neruda Songs2010-04-26T19:46:12Z2010-04-26T19:42:10Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2010://1.1762010-04-26T19:42:10ZLast week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic played Peter Lieberson’s beautiful piece, Neruda Songs, a setting of five sonnets by Pablo Neruda written in 2005 for his wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Lorraine passed away in July, 2006 from breast cancer, but...PViapianoMusic
Last week, the Los Angeles Philharmonic played Peter Lieberson’s beautiful piece, Neruda Songs, a setting of five sonnets by Pablo Neruda written in 2005 for his wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Lorraine passed away in July, 2006 from breast cancer, but in her too-short career accomplished so much and became one of the most brilliant voices we’ve ever had the chance to hear. I wrote a small piece upon her death, which summed up the loss that so many felt when she died.

I remember seeing the look on Esa-Pekka’s face just before one of our first rehearsals for John Adams’ El Nino in March, 2003. He had just had a run-through with Lorraine in his dressing room and his normally unflappable demeanor was replaced by a gushing look of amazement as he confided backstage to several players, “I’ve just had the most amazing concert in my room.”

Esa-Pekka and the orchestra premiered Neruda Songs in May, 2005 with Lorraine singing and Peter participating in an onstage conversation with EP regarding the piece and Peter’s inspiration for it. Although I didn’t play Neruda Songs that night (there is no part for my instrument in the orchestration) I was onstage to play excerpts from Stravinsky’s Agon, which Peter cited as an influence.

Peter’s father was Goddard Lieberson, the long-time president of Columbia Records who signed so many artists to that label and built it into a powerhouse of its time. During his conversation, Peter recounted that while growing up the house was always full of musical luminaries for visits and dinner. Shortly after Stravinsky had immigrated to this country, Goddard sent an invitation. He was so very concerned with the composer’s well-being in America that he gifted him that evening with a rather large book, the voluminous Tax Code of the United States. The maestro accepted the gift quite graciously as any guest would. Several weeks later when Goddard was speaking to Stravinsky on the phone, he asked him if he had enjoyed the book. Igor replied, “Yes, and I cried on every page.”

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Exhibitionist2010-04-01T19:41:42Z2010-04-01T18:59:12Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2010://1.1752010-04-01T18:59:12ZI’ve taken a hiatus during these last two months to relax, readjust and focus. I think it’s good for artists to recharge their batteries every now and then, let things fall where they may and take time to reflect. Breathe...PViapianoCulture
I’ve taken a hiatus during these last two months to relax, readjust and focus. I think it’s good for artists to recharge their batteries every now and then, let things fall where they may and take time to reflect. Breathe here…

As I may have mentioned here before, I’m a dedicated photographer who uses film almost exclusively, prints in the darkroom and use various 19th Century historical processes to produce my final images. Yep, it’s all very geeky but it allows me to combine a love of visual arts with the technical side of my nature, plus I get to have the biggest chemistry set a kid could ever dream of.

After a few years and many hours of darkroom toil, I’m happy to announce that I’m participating in my first ever gallery show at the Elias Gallery in Whittier, California along with a group of incredible local photographer/printers who have been most encouraging and supportive. I have four prints in the show, two platinum/palladium and two gelatin silver lith prints, chosen by the show’s curator, Domenico Foschi.

Domenico Foschi is an Italian-born photographer living in southern California whom I met on the internet in a photography forum. His images were dreamlike and evocative. When I first saw his prints in person at two different shows I knew I had found someone with great vision and articulate skills to bring the image to life on paper. When the opportunity arose to buy one of his prints, I was thrilled to meet him in person and spend time talking, but what surprised me most was his openness and generosity. He was more interested in seeing and talking about my nascent work than telling me about his. It was a great hour and I came away so inspired, one of those rare moments that make you want to work harder to achieve your goals.

The gallery exhibition is currently open, with a reception scheduled for May 8.

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Just Do It, Part 12010-01-31T18:41:33Z2010-01-31T18:35:16Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2010://1.1742010-01-31T18:35:16ZNo, I’m not talking about Tiger Woods’ motto for living life, but the inescapable fact that things are happening out there and you have to take advantage of them before they go away. So suspend your NetFlix account, turn off...PViapianoMisc
No, I’m not talking about Tiger Woods’ motto for living life, but the inescapable fact that things are happening out there and you have to take advantage of them before they go away. So suspend your NetFlix account, turn off your television, get in your car and celebrate the new year with a few of these ideas.

First things first. Coffee.

Not one, but three…wait, make that four new places to satisfy your caffeine addiction. Three are in downtown LA (hey, I’ve been working there for the last three months!), one in Pasadena and one more in Silverlake. Here we go:

Urth Caffé
451 South Hewitt Street, on Hewitt and 5th, in the Arts District of Downtown Los Angeles.

Housed in an old egg factory and part of the current downtown Renaissance, this place has it all with an especially friendly staff, exceptional organic coffee and plenty of dangerous desserts. The funky neighborhood-turned-lofty is a perfect setting for getting your fix day or night.

Another organic coffee resource with several locations. The 2nd Street café is the one closest to the Music Center and although I visited only once, the coffee was excellent. The counter staff is a little disorganized and not as together as at Urth Caffe, but the beans (Lucky Jack) I brought back to the orchestra pit to be brewed by our in house coffee bitcharista, Kenny Wild, were incredibly flavorful. Maybe next time we’ll try the aptly named Bitches Brew, their darkest roast.

Just across Hope Street from the Walt Disney Concert Hall in a small shopping center on the ground floor of one of LA’s earliest downtown residences, Prime Grind is without a doubt my favorite convenient downtown coffee hangout. A long narrow room with work from local artists on the walls, the staff at PG know how to make the perfect espresso and a lot more. Perfect, as in taste…and perfectly made every single time. A lot of LA Opera musicians can be seen there juicing up before those 4 ½ hour marathons they play. Oh…and the gelato is an accompaniment without compare.

I’d been passing this shop for months wondering about it until I stopped in after dropping my daughter off at ballet class just down the street. A funky hang in a community-cum-living-room makes me feel like I’m not in LA but maybe somewhere in northern Wisconsin. They roast their own, and while the service may be on the slow side, the finished coffee drink is one of the best in Pasadena.

LaMill Coffee at 1636 Silver Lake Boulevard is an amazing coffee and tea lovers paradise. Along with good food, they offer coffee via several methods of extraction. Yes, I said extraction…this place is serious. Choose the Chemex method and your personal coffee brewmaster will hang out at your table until the nectar is finished cycling through the filter. This is the connoisseur’s coffee nirvana and it’s well worth taking a detour to experience. Can’t say enough about it!

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The Girl in the Magnesium Dress2009-12-04T18:57:42Z2009-12-04T18:34:08Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2009://1.1732009-12-04T18:34:08ZWhen I received the email asking if I’d like to participate in the LA Philharmonic’s Left Coast/West Coast Festival, curated by composer John Adams, I immediately said yes. I’ve written here before about my experiences playing John’s music and it...PViapianoLive Performance
When I received the email asking if I’d like to participate in the LA Philharmonic’s Left Coast/West Coast Festival, curated by composer John Adams, I immediately said yes. I’ve written here before about my experiences playing John’s music and it is fun, challenging, sometimes terrifying but always incredibly rewarding. New music can be like that, walking through the ring of fire to prove to ourselves that we’re still alive and kicking.

Turns out John himself would be conducting five pieces from Frank Zappa’s The Yellow Shark, a collection of music Zappa had hiding in his Synclavier and realized late in life for Pierre Boulez and the Germany-based Ensemble Moderne. Some of it is pure Zappa, a faithful orchestral rendering of his trademark multi-time-signature and syncopated antics that he often used as episodic interludes between guitar solos or other comedic lyrics. Others inhabit a world that Frank was indelibly drawn to, the world of Varese and the early avant-gardists and the late ones as well, culminating in the crystalline order of Pierre Boulez. As John Adams writes in his blog (and if you haven’t discovered it yet, it’s a must-read…you can find it here):

Ah, but the timbres are super—all dazzling, hard-edged and brilliant. The ensemble for “The Girl” is pure magnesium. Total Pierre. Check out that cimbalom. And a mandolin and classical geetar! Un éclat of shattering crystal. A regular explosante-fixe in a glass factory.

Ah yes…The Girl in the Magnesium Dress. It seemed more like molybdenum to me, denser than dense, almost impenetrable in spots, but there also were islands of pure coherency, a near-miss and then, near-bliss. An attempt to fuse chaos onto a 32nd note grid and thereby tame the quark, but the quark laughs at such foolish behavior and bites you on the ass for trying. At least that’s what my mandolin part was like.

I met Frank Zappa in Buffalo, NY many years ago, before I moved west. He had hired the Buffalo Philharmonic to rehearse some orchestral music he’d been writing. A friend in orchestra management invited me to hang out in the hall and listen. After the rehearsal I ran across Frank backstage, sitting on an Anvil road case and having a smoke all by himself. I struck up a conversation that centered on the possibility of him writing for the guitar in an orchestral setting, and he mentioned that several of the afternoon’s pieces did indeed have parts but weren’t with him that day. We chatted about a mutual friend who had been playing in his band and Frank relished telling me more than a few Vinny Colaiuta stories. I invited him to dinner and he declined because he was flying out immediately after the rehearsal. That was the extent of my 15 minutes with Frank Zappa, never to be forgotten.

Meanwhile, back in LA, we had to rehearse this stuff, after everyone had already put in a bazillion hours on their own. The fact that the first rehearsal was two days after Thanksgiving meant that a lot of shedding and polishing was going to be happening during a busy, busy time.

The first thing John said at the rehearsal was, “Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for giving up your Thanksgiving.” We laughed a knowing laugh since we all knew how close to the truth it was, but we were ready for anything because, my God, when someone acknowledges a simple fact like that, you will go to the ends of the earth for him.

I imagined turkey roasting to the sounds of a violinist pizzing and plucking, smacking the instrument with an open hand, a quick arco gesture and returning to more percussive abuse. Questi Cazzi di Piccione (find your own Google translator cuz I ain’t writing it here, buddy) for string quintet was brilliantly played and to tell the truth, sounded damn near perfect at first run-through.

Ruth Is Sleeping, a four-hands piano piece was also brilliantly performed by Joanne Pearce Martin (LA Phil principal) and Vicki Ray (principal everywhere else). I heard a lot of stories about their practice sessions together for this piece and that’s part of the fun and excitement of being involved in something like this. They’re war stories, really, and the bonds they create translate to the commitment and performance of the music. I love the smell of 32nd notes over the barline of a compound meter in the morning. That kind of thing.

Uncle Meat/The Dog Breath Variations was pure Zappa writ large with an expanded ensemble. The mellifluously titled G-Spot Tornado was a manic romp/trance dance full of fractured energy, especially when Mark Watters’ baritone sax literally burst through the seams of the orchestra to announce its presence. John had wanted to play this one “as fast as we can play it, and then one notch more,” and he got his chance when four or five bows and curtain calls later from a hopped-up new music audience on their feet in Walt Disney Concert Hall, he turned to us and said, “Let’s do it again!”

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Note: More pieces on new music and John Adams from this blog can be found here:

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Yeah, Kenny!2009-11-19T20:18:34Z2009-11-19T17:29:08Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2009://1.1722009-11-19T17:29:08ZWith that little catch phrase, so end many nights in orchestra pits in and around LA. Local tradition holds that whenever a substitute player finishes his or her first night on a show, if they are particularly “on” (and they...PViapianoMusic
With that little catch phrase, so end many nights in orchestra pits in and around LA. Local tradition holds that whenever a substitute player finishes his or her first night on a show, if they are particularly “on” (and they usually are!) someone in the orchestra will yell out, “Yeah, (name here)!” immediately after the exit music. It’s a nice accolade from fellow players in response to a good first performance. About ten years ago at the Pantages Theatre, after a great substitute performance by bassist Kenny Wild, “Yeah, Kenny!” could be heard throughout the pit and it stuck…even if Kenny is not there. So now, after the usual accolades to the evening’s players someone will always add “Yeah, Kenny!” and it cracks everyone up and puts all in a good mood for the evening hang or the drive home.

I think it’s a fitting tribute to a guy who has always been one of my favorite musicians in LA, a bassist of extraordinary feel and versatility, with a personality that is so infectious with good will and optimism that you can’t help but rise to the occasion whenever he sits next to you. That, and his playing are what has made him a mainstay in the Los Angeles studio scene for over 30 years.

Before I moved here 27 years ago, I was a fan of the band Seawind. They burst on the local music scene, after honing their songs and performance in Hawaii, with a debut album on Creed Taylor’s revered jazz label, CTI. It was a change for Creed’s label, which was used to releasing sides from jazz artists like Joe Farrell and George Benson. Their songs had a fresh sound with a tight horn section and featured incredible vocalist Pauline Wilson (then-wife of drummer Bob Wilson), keys/saxophonist Larry Williams and, of course, Kenny Wild on bass. It heralded a new direction in pop music. Almost every player in the band became popular in the studios appearing on countless recordings that were made during that rich time in LA’s music history.

Recently, Seawind got back together for a reunion CD and subsequent tour of Japan, where they were extremely popular. I’ve been listening every chance I get and it is so much fun to hear the band play new renditions of some of their most popular tunes and introduce new ones. The CD is engineered and mixed by Steve Sykes with a big sound that while modern in its aural space brings me right back to the high energy of the band’s original sound.

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The Big Beta Test2009-10-16T22:00:57Z2009-10-15T00:41:10Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2009://1.1712009-10-15T00:41:10ZThis week T*Mobile announced that due to a massive server outage almost all Sidekick data, including email, contact info, events and to-do lists are gone forever, vaporized into the ether of cloud computing. The Sidekick, you may recall, was one...PViapianoComputing
This week T*Mobile announced that due to a massive server outage almost all Sidekick data, including email, contact info, events and to-do lists are gone forever, vaporized into the ether of cloud computing. The Sidekick, you may recall, was one of the first phones to offer email and web access, a forerunner of today’s state of the art Apple iPhone.

The lesson here is to make sure that if you rely on a so-called smart phone or web application, you must have a reliable in-house backup method. This applies to services like Google’s Gmail, Yahoo Mail or any of their online services (calendar, to-do, etc) as well. All your info is stored on their servers, nothing resides on your computer. Should a mishap occur, you just can’t rely on that provider’s possibly nonexistent redundancy.

Cell phones…they’re an indispensable convenience in so many ways allowing us to do business from almost anywhere, keep tabs on the kids, get help in emergencies; the list goes on. They’ve been around for how many years now? Then, why is it no matter what phone you use, whether a lowly RAZR or the latest iPhone 3GS, do we still have to deal with dropped calls, voicemail messages that sometimes arrive a day late and other annoying anomalies that should have been taken care of long ago for a service that charges $50 or more per month?

I think it’s a big never-ending beta test.

October 16, 2009 Update: Microsoft, owner of the maker of the Sidekick phone, announced that they would be able to restore most, if not all of the data lost by the server outage.

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Irving Penn: An Appreciation2010-07-04T09:12:37Z2009-10-08T18:18:39Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2009://1.1702009-10-08T18:18:39ZLate last night I read the news that photographer Irving Penn had died at age 92. Although he was widely known as a fashion photographer, his career spanned many radically different phases but the common thread through all was his...PViapianoCulture
Late last night I read the news that photographer Irving Penn had died at age 92. Although he was widely known as a fashion photographer, his career spanned many radically different phases but the common thread through all was his clean, spare style and his particular view of the world.

Portraits, still lifes, ethnic studies, nudes, almost nothing escaped the gaze of Penn’s camera and was transformed in the process. Penn was an inveterate experimenter in photographic processes having almost single-handedly, in the 1960s, brought back the nineteenth-century art of the handmade platinum/palladium print.

He was an adept master printer in the darkroom, turning out beautifully luminous photographs on gelatin silver fiber paper, the common black and white photographic paper of the day and used workaday methods such as bleaching and toning to bring his subjects alive on the paper. Penn realized that the art of the photographer lie not only in clicking the shutter but in revealing that image in now seemingly anachronistic alchemic methods which remain unmatched in quality and beauty. The integrity of the artist having a hands-on dialogue with his materials from spark of creation to finished print is Penn’s legacy to all creative persons.

He was known as a perfectionist, but we know that perfection can never be attained no matter how hard we try, for in the moment it is within reach it becomes a sterile and inhuman thing and shatters into fragments. Penn never achieved the perfection he was looking for, but what he did achieve was resonance and there can be no greater achievement for an artist than to have an audience who feels the reverberations of knowingness when they gaze upon your work.

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The Speech2009-10-07T06:38:37Z2009-10-07T06:35:16Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2009://1.1692009-10-07T06:35:16ZA few weeks ago, as kids across America returned to school to begin another academic year, a fever pitch arose from din to clamor over the President’s then-upcoming address exhorting students to stay in school and work hard. At first,...PViapianoMisc
A few weeks ago, as kids across America returned to school to begin another academic year, a fever pitch arose from din to clamor over the President’s then-upcoming address exhorting students to stay in school and work hard.

At first, I was amused by the few comments I read, though even amongst this partisan America, was still surprised, but when all hell broke loose within the next few days I had to step back, take a look and figure it all out.

How could anyone have any objection to any President past or current, addressing students and giving them a pep talk about buckling down, doing the work and staying focused? In recent years Presidents Reagan, GHW Bush and Clinton gave “new school year” speeches without the maelstrom of protest we saw this time around. (GHW Bush’s speech was decried by Democrats post-speech but on the basis of spending taxpayer money for “paid political advertisement” purposes. Bush the W was conspicuously absent from the practice.)

I went to the website of the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, which had raised one of the first objections. There I found a press release explaining their position.

It seems they were miffed by the Dept of Education’s handouts and lesson plans that were distributed and/or available to teachers to help students prepare for the speech and analyze it afterwards. They objected to the “glorification” of the President by the suggestion that students “read books about Presidents and Barack Obama” and by questions to be answered after the speech, such as “How did President Obama inspire you?”

They didn’t like that the children were asked to make posters about setting “community and country goals” and to “listen to the President and other elected officials”.

Are people actually worried that this will “indoctrinate” our children into “group speak/group think” and social activism of the Democratic persuasion?

Sorry, but this kind of thinking will indoctrinate children into a world of paranoia and a culture of fear that has no place in anyone’s America.

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Back Again2009-10-07T06:39:54Z2009-10-07T05:59:58Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2009://1.1682009-10-07T05:59:58ZFall is here, the weather is cooling off in Southern California (finally!) and hopefully I'll have more time to devote to writing. Life stays busy, especially with a six year old daughter, and I've been experimenting with new-to-me antiquarian photo...PViapianoMisc
Fall is here, the weather is cooling off in Southern California (finally!) and hopefully I'll have more time to devote to writing. Life stays busy, especially with a six year old daughter, and I've been experimenting with new-to-me antiquarian photo processes, each of which you could devote a lifetime to. I'll be writing about them sometime soon as well as an array of other subjects. At times I may even get a little political...well, maybe not political but c'mon...someone's got to keep a sane take on things, right?

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Brett Weston: Out of the Shadow2009-08-22T08:08:20Z2009-08-22T08:03:16Ztag:www.paulviapiano.com,2009://1.1672009-08-22T08:03:16ZA few weeks ago we drove up to Santa Barbara to see some old friends and for me to get a chance to see the Brett Weston exhibit at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Brett, who was the second...PViapianoMisc
A few weeks ago we drove up to Santa Barbara to see some old friends and for me to get a chance to see the Brett Weston exhibit at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Brett, who was the second oldest child of Edward Weston, one of the most famous of the West Coast photographers working in the early-middle years of the twentieth century, left school and followed his father on his early journeys to Mexico where he learned the technical craft of of his art. His sense of composition, point of view, his “voice”, was already maturing. Several early photographs clearly show that Brett was his own person with a style that differed from his well-known father.

I was impressed by the sheer number of photographs in the show, well over one hundred, mostly 11x14 in size. In traditional film photography, I’ve always felt that the actual making of the image in-camera represents only half of the final artwork. The other half, and by far the hardest part, is printing the image in the darkroom. This is where the photographer’s vision is realized, in the alchemy of light, paper and chemistry. These prints were awesome in the literal meaning of that overused word. Inky black richness and detailed highlights coexisting with a beautiful scale of grey that sucked you into its world. I read somewhere that to see the light, you have to print dark, and while that may be a gross generalization (and opinion!) I can see the genesis of that idea in these prints. Even more amazing is that almost all of them are contact prints, the negative and the paper sandwiched together in a frame and exposed to a light source. All of the beautiful richness of the print has to be on the negative itself, for there is little opportunity to use the usual tricks of the trade that photographers who enlarge their negatives use quite regularly and matter-of-factly.

I was surprised that I was drawn to the abstract photographs of intense beauty; cracks in a mud plain, peeling paint, broken glass, close-ups of tide pools, bubbles and other subjects, seeing that I hadn’t been interested in that style before, but these were printed so beautifully that I instantly “got it”. It took two hours to see it all and I could easily have gone back several times to let it all sink in.

The show’s no longer in Santa Barbara, but you can visit the Brett Weston Archive here.